Rain Over Madrid

by Andrés Barba

  One day, as he was leaving the apartment, a man approached him.

  “Are you Sonia’s boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m her father. Could we go get a coffee?”

  He looked like a real estate developer—elegantly dressed, balding, hair slicked back, face a bit doughy but skin exhibiting the smoothness only opulence can provide—and he wore too much cologne. He pictured him as the epitome of a certain kind of Iberian male: married to a frigid blonde, eating enormous roasts every Sunday. He said that they were worried, that they knew Sonia was pregnant, that she wouldn’t pick up the phone when any of them called anymore, even her siblings. He had a disturbing way of using the plural for everything he said, as though he were representing an organization rather than talking about a family. In fact, every one of the man’s gestures seemed commercial, including the hand-reach he used to stop him from pulling his out wallet to pay for the coffee.

  “This is on me.”

  He really only wanted to know if Sonia was OK, if she needed anything, if she was having any difficulties with the pregnancy. He left a card, on which he jotted a private number where he could be reached at any time, and asked him not to tell Sonia about their meeting, all with a kind of phony camaraderie that riled him, because it made him an accessory.

  “So. You’re . . . a musician, right?” he eventually asked, with a certain disdainful air. He recognized this gesture of Sonia’s, suddenly transplanted onto the face of that man.

  The first thing he did that night was to tell Sonia about it, if only to rid himself of the feeling that he’d colluded with her father. First she became irate and insisted on hearing every detail of the conversation—seeming excessively concerned about exactly what he’d told her father—and then she grew silent and pensive. Finally, she cried, alone in the bedroom. He went in and sat beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

  “You don’t have to try to be nice,” she responded.

  It had been an unaffected gesture, perhaps one of the few unaffected gestures he’d made toward her, so he was stung by the fact that this of all gestures was the one Sonia saw as staged. He felt deadened and strange—as though his presence were unnecessary in the world, even to touch the shoulder of this pregnant girl—but also alright. One thing would lead to another, he thought, and life would once more resume its normal course, even if he didn’t know what those words meant in that particular combination, referring to life—its normal course. He could think of the baby only in abstract terms, regardless of the fact that Sonia’s pregnancy was increasingly obvious. If all went well, it would be born in four months. Sonia remained pensive for a few more days, and then one night when they were almost ready to go to bed, she made a disturbing declaration.

  “There’s something I have to tell you, something I haven’t told you up until now.” She spoke the words with such solemnity that he immediately stopped doing the dishes and turned to face her.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m a millionaire.”

  “What do you mean, you’re a millionaire?”

  The declaration was so absurd that he didn’t know what to think.

  “Just what I said. I’m a millionaire. I have a lot of money.”

  “How much money are we talking about?” he asked. He found the conversation almost comical. It was comical, but, for some reason, it was also irritating him. Perhaps it was just that the ridiculousness of that word—millionaire—rubbed him the wrong way.

  “In cash, about three hundred thousand euros, mostly in stocks, and in property, two houses in Madrid, not counting my share of my father’s stuff.”

  “And what is your father’s stuff?”

  “A villa, two lumber mills, a furniture factory, six or seven houses, maybe more, I don’t know; there’re other things, but I can’t remember them all right now.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then the only thing he could think to ask was, “So why were you living in that tiny loft when I met you?”

  “I don’t know, I felt like it.”

  “You felt like it?”

  Sonia’s reply exploded like gunfire.

  “Yes, I felt like it.”

  They spoke a little more, somewhat perfunctorily, and then went to bed. Sonia didn’t spoon him that night, and the next day, he looked back on their conversation with genuine displeasure. He didn’t think he had any kind of inferiority complex with regard to her money. The sum was so colossal that he had trouble even imagining it. He’d never been particularly interested in money; he’d always had enough to live on, and at that time, thanks to his minor celebrity and the tours he was doing, he had more than enough. He spent what he had as if it were burning a hole in his pocket and was vaguely disdainful of those who were frugal and meticulous with their money, as though he associated that sort of behavior with inevitable unhappiness. What really upset him about the conversation with Sonia was the lie it had involved, a lie that had been perpetuated over the course of many months. And the way Sonia related to her own wealth seemed infantile: she had demonstrated a certain degree of bad faith in acting like she didn’t have all that money, in refusing to use her property—something he couldn’t articulate but that irritated him and negated the possibility, by that point already rather remote, of staying with her for the rest of his life.

  By chance that month, he had a series of concerts in provincial cities that kept him away from home more than usual, and when he finished the tour, he decided not to go straight back. For ten-plus days, the only news he’d had from Sonia had come in the form of a few laconic voicemails, and in the final city on his tour, he slept with a girl about twenty years old who took him back to her shared apartment. There, surrounded by photos of the girl, in that tiny bedroom, lying naked with the body of a stranger curled up on the other side of the bed, it struck him that his life for the past year, since he’d met Sonia—and maybe longer, maybe his entire life—had transpired in a way that suddenly seemed hazy and incomprehensible, as though it were nothing but an accumulation of paradoxes and more or less absurd situations. The first time he thought he was going to be a father was while staring at the girl’s naked back—hunched like an old man’s—and the seductive curve of her hips, and the roundness of her buttocks, which had an unusual birthmark, a little spot in the shape of Australia. He put a hand on her hip and she responded by turning to face him. She was pretty, though sleepiness and too much booze the night before had diminished her beauty. They had sex again, in a way that was slow and careful but also a bit clinical, as though the two felt engrossed but distant, and all the while, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sonia, about Sonia and about the baby, and it was in that strange space of physical intimacy—in the contact with the girl’s skin and the roundness of her body—that he felt it for the first time, felt that he was going to be a father in just a few months, and the mother was none other than Sonia.

  When he got home, he found her working at the computer, silent and sullen. She turned and stared at him for what seemed a long time. He didn’t even dare to approach, didn’t dare to say hello; the distance between them was abysmal.

  “This is not what I had imagined. This is not the life I want.”

  Two prefabricated sentences. Two sentences Sonia must have been thinking to herself for perhaps quite some time. It struck him as slightly ludicrous to have to beg forgiveness for not having lived up to expectations that he himself had never set, so he didn’t do it. Nor did she demand it of him. In the brief space of that week, she’d become a different person, perhaps the one that she really was, and in order to make a decision, the person that she really was needed to feel a little disdain for him.

  “I talked to my parents. I think I’m going to go home. For now. Then I’ll figure out what to do later. Do you want me to let you know when the baby’s born?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Help me take th
ese suitcases down, I can’t manage by myself.”

  She was a strong woman, much stronger than he was, he thought to himself at that moment, though it was the first time he’d ever had that conviction. That tiny, pregnant twenty-four-year-old who lumbered awkwardly, placing a hand on her hip, could have literally climbed over a tank right then if she’d put her mind to it. He walked her to the taxi, and as they said goodbye, he bent to give her a kiss.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said, slamming the door. The driver didn’t dare to protest.

  The baby was born two months later.

  “Sonia’s about to give birth,” one of her brothers informed him brusquely over the phone. “At the Clínica de la Inmaculada, room 342, maternity ward. She asked me to let you know.”

  They’d spoken on the phone several times over the course of those months but hadn’t seen each other. Sonia had been torn between the ill will she bore him and that reserved for her family. In the end, the ill will she bore him won out, and because her family shared that particular ill will, his reencounter with them was an interesting one. If he’d known the degree of animosity he was going to face at the clinic, he might not have dared to go see his son for the first time. They seemed to have come to a collective agreement not to acknowledge him, and the one person he held out his hand to, Sonia’s father, didn’t deign to shake it and instead simply gave a curt thanks. There was also a brother who must have been about his age and who seemed to be making every effort not to leap up and crack his skull open right then and there. The room was narrow and crowded, and although there were younger girls squealing excitedly, the air was heavy with a sadness that felt terse and disappointed; everyone seemed to be holding back in some way or another, and when he walked in, he felt all eyes turn indiscreetly on him, as though he were wholly responsible for the unhappiness of the situation. Finally, he saw Sonia, lying in bed, the baby on her chest. She didn’t look like herself; her features seemed thicker, and she had the same phony regal air—conditioned, almost—as all the people surrounding her. She regarded him solemnly and then smiled, asking everyone to leave them alone. Her request was met with a not insignificant show of displeasure by the majority of the entourage, and then came a truly ludicrous moment when Sonia’s brother approached her and, glancing warily at him out of the corner of his eye, asked, “You sure you’re going to be OK?” as though really wanting to know, “How can we be sure he’s not going to rape you again?”

  “Have they been horrible to you?” Sonia asked when the two of them were alone.

  “Sort of.”

  “Look. Don’t you want to see your son?”

  She placed the boy into his arms. It was shocking how hideous he was, and how small. The first thing he noticed was his lightness, an unusual lightness, as though he were nothing but the fruit of a feeling. Then, the fact that he looked wet, and unnervingly guilt-ridden. He didn’t look like either him or Sonia. Was it really possible to know a baby? The only thing he knew about him was that he was there, that he was attempting, now that he was awake, to figure out where his little body stopped and started, to train it. He understood—though he wasn’t yet at the stage of actually feeling—the emotion, an emotion that formed part of a greater sort of love, a love he’d never experienced until that moment. Sonia was in a better mood now that she was alone with him.

  “What are you going to name him?” he asked

  “Antón, after his grandfather,” she replied.

  “Your father?”

  Sonia nodded. He took the baby’s tiny glove off and examined his hand.

  “What’s this for?”

  “So he doesn’t scratch his face with his fingernails. He can’t control his little hands yet.”

  “Listen . . .”

  Sonia eyed him with concern; she didn’t want any big declarations, and suddenly he, too, felt incapable of making them. He was still holding the baby in his arms, feeling his warmth and strangeness. It was extraordinary, his simple way of just being, the whole thing seemed to him like a children’s story whose moral was yet to come. He held a finger out, and Antón grabbed it with fingers that looked almost sinister, so tiny were they. He took in Sonia’s smell, a sweetish smell of sensitive flesh. She now wore the same sprightly expression she used to, birdlike.

  “Don’t make that goofy face,” she said.

  Finally he laughed, for the first time.

  “You look goofy,” she repeated.

  “Oh, do I?”

  They were silent for a moment. On the other side of the door, Sonia’s family could be heard making a commotion, increasingly restless.

  “You should probably go,” she said.

  For the first year of Antón’s life, Sonia continued to live with her parents, which made it impossible to see his son with any regularity. He’d see him occasionally, nearly always when she took him for walks in the Parque del Retiro. They’d meet close to the main entrance, at the Puerta de Alcalá, and from there, walk to the artificial lake in the park. They had less and less in common. Sonia had just finished her degree and begun working as a psychologist, was planning to open her own office once she felt “suitably qualified”, and she’d often practice on him, telling him what his biggest problem was.

  “Your biggest problem is that you don’t think life is real,” she once said—after having told him, in similar circumstances over recent months, that his biggest problem was his fear of commitment, that his biggest problem was his relationship with his mother, and that his biggest problem was that he didn’t know the meaning of the word progress. That day, however, Sonia’s words hurt more than usual, perhaps because they hit closer to the mark than usual. Somehow, she’d gone from happy-go-lucky rebel to slightly arrogant and overconfident twenty-five-year-old. He found her unpleasant in several ways: her way of dressing, for instance, had become that of a small, somewhat cynical, self-possessed middle-aged woman, and her way of speaking, assertive, ever ready to draw definitive conclusions. She’d also taken on the annoying habit of calling him “sweetheart”, in a singsong voice, as though speaking to a charming little boy, a tiny troublemaker. They—mainly Sonia—would talk about this and that for the first hour and a half, and in the last fifteen minutes, she’d ask him how he was doing, as though secretly ashamed of having monopolized the conversation but unwilling to admit it.

  “But let’s not talk about me,” she’d say with a serene air and professional smile, the smile he imagined she’d use on future patients.

  For him, things had started going worse. Their bassist had left and joined another band, and the addition of a new band member had immediately prompted a downward spiral. He almost never wrote songs anymore and was increasingly frustrated at having to play the same two hits over and over, so much so that he reached a point where he flat out refused to do it. The head of the record company, in a bout of honesty, remarked that perhaps it was time to start considering another form of livelihood and suggested he think about doing promo for other bands. It was a good job, the pay wasn’t bad, and he took it because he had no other choice. During that period, until Antón turned two years old, it seemed to him that his only undergirding, the one feeling that remained more or less constant, was the desire to see his son from time to time. It was a desire that took the shape of a disconcerting availability—which Sonia dubbed “periodic guilty conscience”—but that he could only describe as the need to “be present.” Antón had gone from hideous baby to very good-looking boy, slightly effeminate, and very quiet, so much so that at first, they took it as the sign of a problem. He turned out to be simply an exceptionally tranquil child.

  “Lucky me. Honestly, I am so lucky,” Sonia would say with the false conviction of a parent secretly longing for a noisy, rambunctious child.

  He’d begun to say a few words, or at least Sonia claimed as much, though each time he saw him, the boy shriveled up so much he resembled a little mask. He tod
dled unsteadily, always toward Sonia, and seemed to fear even the mere possibility of receiving a kiss from him. Antón was only at ease when Sonia was by his side, and if she moved away even slightly or disappeared momentarily, he’d stare up at him with tiny, terrified eyes. He thought then that the child couldn’t have developed everything on his own, that some part of himself must, of necessity, have filtered down to Antón—his fear, maybe—that the boy must have inherited something of him. When he was with him, it was hard to think clearly, it was nearly impossible to find the words to describe the sentiment in its entirety. He liked that he was so well dressed, that he was quiet, liked that he was handsome, liked the expression of concentration he wore when examining something—a blade of grass, a new toy—liked the smell he gave off, a smell of young flesh with a slightly syrupy undertone, which could have been an eau de toilette Sonia put on him. But it was as though he couldn’t get past any of those sensations, as though he couldn’t rise above them or assemble them into any overarching conclusion. He felt a strange desire, a distinct urge for the boy to be happy, but it also felt as though the desire were something greater than himself, as though it were absolutely out of his reach. At times, he’d find himself trying to forge little alliances with the boy, to establish some common language that only the two of them could understand. He would place a toy in his hand and curl up three fingers as he did so, hoping that he, too, would curl his fingers; or he’d imitate his walk, toddling somberly. Right from the start, he’d given up on trying to make him laugh, he wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as if the boy laughed much with other people, anyway, and he hated acting like a clown. In fact, he preferred it when the boy was gape-mouthed in awe, or exhausted and asleep in his stroller, or even crying. He sensed that a sort of breach opened up then, that he could reach into his mind in some delicate, mysterious way.